Breaking news:King Charles III’s fairy tale isn’t the one we remember as marriage to Camilla reaches 20-year mark: Read more

There was the lavish royal wedding. A kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Cheers from the adoring throngs below.

Wait! That’s the wrong story. The right one is much more, well, complicated.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla met more than 50 years ago but their romance had to survive meddling families, marriages to other people and no small amount of public ridicule before they finally married. On Wednesday, the royal couple celebrate their 20th anniversary, a milestone made all the more remarkable by the fact that for so long their love story was overshadowed by the fairy tale princess who came before Camilla.

We missed the love story, there’s no doubt about it,’’ said Sally Bedell Smith, author of “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.’’ “But in fairness, it was not something that was very visible.”

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WORLD NEWS
King Charles III’s fairy tale isn’t the one we remember as marriage to Camilla reaches 20-year mark
BY DANICA KIRKA
Updated 5:06 AM GMT+1, April 9, 2025
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LONDON (AP) — It was a fairy tale romance.

There was the lavish royal wedding. A kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Cheers from the adoring throngs below.

Wait! That’s the wrong story. The right one is much more, well, complicated.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla met more than 50 years ago but their romance had to survive meddling families, marriages to other people and no small amount of public ridicule before they finally married. On Wednesday, the royal couple celebrate their 20th anniversary, a milestone made all the more remarkable by the fact that for so long their love story was overshadowed by the fairy tale princess who came before Camilla.

“We missed the love story, there’s no doubt about it,’’ said Sally Bedell Smith, author of “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.’’ “But in fairness, it was not something that was very visible.”

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It’s a long story
Britain’s Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles leave the Ritz Hotel in London, the first time that the couple, who have been friends for more than 25 years, have appeared together in public, Thursday, Jan. 28, 1999. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)
Britain’s Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles leave the Ritz Hotel in London, the first time that the couple, who have been friends for more than 25 years, have appeared together in public, Thursday, Jan. 28, 1999. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

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The road between the time they met in the 1970s and their marriage on April 9, 2005, was rocky.

Charles, then a young naval officer, fell in love but was soon sent to sea for eight months. While he was away, Camilla accepted the proposal of a dashing cavalry officer.

But they remained friends, even as Charles’ courtship and marriage to Lady Diana Spencer played out before an adoring nation in 1981. And they were more than friends when both of their marriages crumbled in the mid-1990s.

Many in Britain blamed Camilla for the extramarital affair that torpedoed his marriage to Diana, the glamorous young mother of Princes William and Harry who was adored for her style and the human touch she brought to her charity work. That resentment flared when “the People’s Princess” died in a Paris car crash in 1997, five years after her messy, public split from Charles.